Free Text Only Editors for Templates, PHP, HTML, CSS, and More

A text editor is one that only works with raw text. But what does that really mean?

When you are working with Word, WordPerfect, or any word processing program, the program does the “thinking” for you and automatically converts “quote marks” into curly cute character codes. On the screen they look like quote marks, but underneath in the code, they are actually character codes or character entities. The quote mark actually looks like & #34; and the apostrophe looks like & #39;. Quote marks, apostrophes, and ampersands, among other characters, are a critical part of HTML, PHP, and other programming code. If you write programming code in a word processor and save or copy it over to the actual file, those character codes may come with it, causing all kinds of errors.

So we recommend that you do your code work on WordPress Themes, template files, PHP, HTML, and CSS in a text only editor to prevent such character conversions.

Some of the following free text editors include spell checking. Some don’t. It depends upon what you are looking for.

For me, the “perfect” text editor includes spell check, search and replace, multiple line search and replace, and programming code recognitioin (colorizes programming code commands). You’ll have to pour through the lists here to see which ones will meet your needs and then take them for a test drive.

Even though many of these are open source and free, please consider donating the cause if you really like the program to help continue the motivation for upgrading and developing the program.

Here are a list of free or shareware text editors lists. May of these lists include reviews, features, and commentaries on the different text editors to help you choose.

[…] Best Free Text Editors list from Triponic. For more on text editors that work with WordPress, see Free Text Only Editors for Templates, PHP, HTML, CSS, and More. Do you have a favorite text editor you use for WordPress […]